A Biographical Profile by Travis Elborough
‘A writer of enormous inventive powers, an explorer of the displacements produced in modern consciousness by the blank ecology of stark architecture, bare high-rises, dead superhighways and featureless technology, he has … a remarkable gift for filling the empty, deprived spaces of modern life with the invisible cities and the wonder worlds of the imagination.’
MALCOLM BRADBURY on J. G. Ballard in 1979
JAMES GRAHAM BALLARD, whose father ran a textile firm in Shanghai, was born in Shanghai General Hospital on 15 November 1930. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the Japanese invasion of China, Ballard and his family were interred in a detention camp for three years. Forming the basis for his acclaimed autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun (1984), this incarceration, along with his formative years in Shanghai, underscores much of Ballard’s imaginative output. His first major novel, The Drowned World (1962), a vision of London inundated by a primeval swamp, was as much an exorcism of childhood memories of the Yangtze as it was a compelling account of an imminent environmental apocalypse. Similarly, many of the leitmotifs in his work – drained swimming pools, abandoned buildings, wasted landscapes and wrecked cars – can be traced back to Shanghai. ‘One of the things I took from my wartime experiences,’ he said, ‘was that reality was a stage set … the comfortable day-to-day life, school, the home where one lives and all the rest of it … could be dismantled overnight.’ And our capacity to engender catastrophe and the ease with which the veneer of civilization can slip away preoccupied Ballard throughout his career. Forming what has been described as a loose trilogy, The Drowned World was followed by two further ‘cataclysmic’ novels: The Drought (1964) and The Crystal World (1966).
To an extent, Ballard came relatively late to the novel. He initially rose to prominence as a writer of short stories for science fiction magazines like Science Fantasy and New Worlds. Many of the themes, obsessions and even characters found in his novels often have analogies or first outings in the shorter works. ‘Almost all of my novels,’ he wrote in 2001, ‘were first hinted at in short stories.’ In the case of Concrete Island, its most obvious predecessor is ‘The Terminal Beach’. In this story from 1964, the protagonist Traven smuggles himself onto an abandoned nuclear-testing island and makes his home amidst decaying concrete blocks, much as Maitland in Concrete Island chooses to maroon himself on a traffic island.
Ballard had begun to write fiction when he was a medical student at Cambridge. One of his early stories – in his words, a ‘Hemingwayesque effort called “The Violent Noon”’ – was joint winner of the university’s annual fiction prize in 1951. The award convinced him to abandon medicine for literature, but the study of anatomy was another invaluable component in Ballard’s creative arsenal. (‘I do think’, he maintained, ‘that novelists should be like scientists, dissecting the cadaver.’)
After leaving Cambridge, he attended Queen Mary College in London and worked as an advertising copywriter and sold encyclopedias door-to-door, before, significantly for his direction as a writer, signing up for a short commission with the RAF. Stationed at a NATO flight-training base in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan in Canada, and hungry for anything to read, Ballard fell upon the science fiction magazines in the airbase’s cafeteria. Although bored by the interplanetary yarns that dominated the field, he immediately responded to the vitality – and possibilities – of the genre. As he told Robert McCrum of the Observer in 2006, here was ‘a fiction that was about the present day that owed nothing to aping past models … a fiction about advertising, the media landscape, television, the threat of nuclear war.’
His first forays into science fiction, the tales ‘Prima Belladonna’ and ‘Escapement’, were published in Science Fantasy Magazine and New Worlds respectively, in December 1956. And in his own words, he ‘never looked back’. Althoughmany of his early stories fall more easily within the boundaries of conventional science fiction, it is a mark of Ballard’s unique take on the form that he quickly met with resistance from many of its devotees. ‘Most readers’, he claimed, ‘saw me as an interloper, a sort of virus that had got into the cell of science fiction.’ While consistently championing it as ‘the authentic literature of the 20th century’, Ballard argued that the true domain of science fiction post-Sputnik was not outer but ‘inner’ space. This was a cosmos of the unconscious – and far more terrifying for being about the human condition now or nearly now. ‘The biggest developments of the immediate future will take place, not on the Moon or Mars, but on Earth,’ he maintained in 1962, adding, memorably, that ‘the only truly alien planet is Earth’.
Shortly before that, Ballard’s first novel, The Wind from Nowhere (1961), had appeared. Written in ten days for £300, it was later disowned by its author, who dismissed it as ‘just a piece of hack work’. The book, however, has its admirers. The novelist Toby Litt selected it in a round-up of forgotten literary treasures for the Observer in 2007. And whatever shortcomings it held for its creator, the novel is, perhaps, most intriguing for containing elements, including the setting of its opening scene (the Great West Road) and its protagonist’s name (Maitland), that reappear in Concrete Island (1974).
It was in a review of this novel that his friend and contemporary, Michael Moorcock, astutely compared Ballard to a surrealist painter. Moorcock observed that Ballard works ‘with a large vocabulary of images that he transmutes and reuses over and over again to accomplish his various literary intentions, in pursuit of a recognizable range of moral concerns’. The emphasis on Ballard’s morality here is far from accidental. Moorcock was writing in the direct aftermath of Crash, a novel dominated by a character whose ultimate autoerotic fantasy is a fatal head-on collision with Elizabeth Taylor, and that remains controversial to this day. But the importance of the visual arts and especially the Surrealists, cited in an author profile for New Worlds back in 1956, cannot be stressed enough. One of Ballard’s closest friends for many years was the artist Eduardo Paolozzi. And Ballard has said of Crash itself that it was composed ‘as a visual experience, marrying elements in the book that make sense primarily as visual constructs’.
Foreshadowing Crash, though, was a series of fragmentary short stories or ‘condensed novels’ subsequently collated in The Atrocity Exhibition (1971). Produced in the latter half of the 1960s, and mainly published in the literary quarterly Ambit and New Worlds (then under Moorcock’s stewardship), they marked a noticeable change in direction and a significant darkening in tone. Sex, violence and celebrity were by now Ballard’s main preoccupations and the experimental ‘cut-up’ novels of William Burroughs an ongoing inspiration. (One story, ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’, prophetic in its suggestion that Reagan, then the governor of California, would become president of the USA, was also so incendiary that it resulted in the entire first American print-run of The Atrocity Exhibition being pulped.)
This shift in focus, however, came in direct response to a personal tragedy, the death of his wife Mary in 1964, and the increasing turbulence of those times. ‘From my point of view,’ Ballard said, ‘the Sixties started in 1963 with the assassination of President Kennedy – his death and the Vietnam War presided over the whole of the Sixties. Those two events, transmitted through television and mass communications, overshadowed the whole decade – a sort of institutionalized disaster area.’
In The Kindness of Women (1991), the autobiographical sequel to Empire of the Sun, his protagonist narrator, Jim, effectively voices Ballard’s own opinion, when he notes that ‘the media landscape of the 1960s was a laboratory designed specifically to cure me of all my obsessions. Violence and pornography provided a kit of desperate measures that might give meaning both to Miriam’s death and the unnumbered victims of the war in China.’ (Miriam is the name of the character closely modelled on Ballard’s own wife.)
Although none of his books would ever be quite as extreme as Crash, its immediate successors, Concrete Island and High-Rise, were similarly bold dissections of the psychopathology of the contemporary urban landscape.
And while Ballard again moved on from what Martin Amis later described as this ‘concrete and steel period’, he continued to probe the darker recesses of the human psyche. From his suburban home in Shepperton, he produced fictions that constantly melded provocative cultural analysis to outrageous, and usually prescient, prediction. Whether chronicling barbarism in a seemingly idyllic upmarket resort in Cocaine Nights (1996), or positing the notion of a middle-class revolution in the mordantly witty Millennium People (2003), Ballard was ceaselessly alert to the inherent horrors and absurdities of the modern world. He was a true visionary, and one of the greatest writers to emerge after the Second World War.